Yarala burchfieldi, Muirhead & Filan, 1995

Beck, Robin M. D., Voss, Robert S. & Jansa, Sharon A., 2022, Craniodental Morphology And Phylogeny Of Marsupials, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (457), pp. 1-353 : 326

† Yarala

SPECIES SCORED: † Yarala burchfieldi (type species).

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Camel Sputum and Upper sites (Riversleigh Faunal Zone B), Riversleigh World Heritage Area, Queensland, Australia.

AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Riversleigh Faunal Zone B is interpreted to be early Miocene based on biostratigraphy (see above). Camel Sputum Site has been radiometrically as 16.97– 18.53 Mya (Woodhead et al., 2014), but a radiometric date is unavailable for Upper Site, so we have used the entire range of the early Miocene (Aquitanian to Burdigalian; Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]) for this taxon.

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 23.030 –15.970 Mya.

REMARKS: † Yarala burchfieldi was the first fossil peramelemorphian to be known from relatively well-preserved cranial material (Muirhead, 2000). Like † Bulungu and † Galadi , it appears to be markedly more plesiomorphic than Recent peramelemorphians (Muirhead and Filan, 1995; Muirhead, 2000), and it consistently falls outside the peramelemorphian crown clade in published phylogenetic analyses (Travouillon et al., 2010, 2013a, 2013b, 2014a, 2017, 2019; Gurovich et al., 2014; Chamberlain et al., 2015; Kear et al., 2016; Travouillon and Phillips, 2018). † Yarala burchfieldi is also notable in that it is the smallest peramelemorphian known, either living or extinct, with an estimated body mass of about 65 g (Travouillon et al., 2009, 2010). Two further † Yarala species — † Y. kida and an as yet unnamed taxon—have been identified based on fragmentary dental material from the late Oligocene or early Miocene Kangaroo Well Local Fauna in the Northern Territory of Australia (Schwartz, 2006b; 2016), but we did not use it to score character data for this study.